Damage Control

by Gordon Kent

  “Any reason to expect the sub’s hostile?”

  “Nope. But I got nothin’ better to do, and frankly I gotta assume he’s hostile until the Indian Navy gets its shit together.”

  Madje nodded, finished his second cup of coffee and squeezed around the chart table. “Thanks for the coffee.” He wondered if the sub problem was worth repeating to the admiral. Talking to O’Leary brought home to him how difficult it would be to sort information and pass it without either taxing a wounded man or oversimplifying the tactical situation.

  Bhulta Airfield, India

  After his telephone call with the admiral, Alan talked to his assistant at Fifth Fleet intel, a lanky lieutenant-commander named Lapierre, whom everybody called “Dickie.” Alan went in detail over everything that had happened, said again that he wanted somebody to recover Borgman’s body.

  Finally, he called home, got the nanny, then Mikey. Rose was dressing, he was told, but suddenly she was there, gasping for breath. “I heard the kids,” she said. She sounded raspy. She yawned—she had got in at four, she said. They talked parent talk, then lovers’ talk, then business—the Jefferson, the bingoed planes at Trincomalee. She was going there soonest, she said; somebody had to negotiate with the Sri Lankans, and she was it. “De facto, I’ll be taking command of the Jeff’s bingoed planes.” She hesitated. “I’m F-18 qualified.”

  “Jesus, Rose—you’re not combat qualified!”

  “Well, no—but they need everybody they can get. It’s a mess.” She made her voice cheerful. “Chris Donitz is senior officer; he an okay guy?”

  “Donuts is great.” Although, he thought, he’d never seen Donuts in a command situation. “I hear Ev Soleck’s down there, too.”

  “Yeah, from the sound of it, he should be getting an air medal, at the least. How’re you?”

  He gave her a sanitized version of the day before, skating quickly over “Kill on sight,” getting to the gold devices and the Servants of the Earth.

  “Hey, that rings a bell,” she said. “Remember Admiral Roopack? From the Indian embassy, he pissed you off at the Indonesians’ party because he—”

  “Held your hand for half an hour and kept looking down your dress, yeah.”

  “It wasn’t half an hour.” She giggled. “He did sort of have his nose between my boobs, though. Anyway, he mentioned Servants of the Earth. He called me last night to tell me that his country was ‘undergoing a small upset,’ blah-blah-blah, and I tried to pick his brains about it, and he said it was under control, blah-blah-blah, and he rattled off a dozen or so groups that might be causing what he called ‘these localized troubles.’ You can maybe talk to him when you get here.”

  “Well—uh—Pilchard’s given me another assignment. That’s for your ears only.”

  Her voice turned hollow. “How long?”

  “Not long.” As in It won’t be long before we either knock this or get killed.

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “We obey orders, babe.”

  “Yeah.” Long pause. “Trouble is, I love you.”

  “Yeah.” Pause. “What a cheerful couple.”

  “Yeah.” A sigh. “Talk to Mikey while I cry.”

  Mikey wanted to talk about hitting a triple in a pickup softball game. A welcome change.

  USS Thomas Jefferson

  Madje, trying to be Rafehausen’s eyes and ears, made his way to the Tactical Action Officer’s spaces and found a new TAO in charge—the ship’s intel officer, an aristocratic O-6 from Massachusetts named Hawkins.

  “Morning, Mister Madje.”

  “Morning, sir. The admiral sent me around to see what was happening. He wants a report.”

  “That’s the best news I’ve heard this morning.” He swiveled his chair to look down his nose at Madje. “You qualified as a TAO?”

  “I’ve done the quals, stood a few watches as flag TAO.”

  “I thought you could hack it. We’ve only got four on the watch bill right now. Can you do it?”

  Madje couldn’t think of a reason not to do it; he had no duties when the admiral was asleep. “I can help out, sir. But the admiral—”

  “Good. When you don’t have other duties, report down here. Want a dump for the admiral?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Marley, print a screen from the JOTS and give it to Mister Madje.” Captain Hawkins swiveled to face the glowing blue screen that filled the after bulkhead. The screen was filled with symbols denoting ships as hostile, neutral, and friendly; symbols that also indicated whether the unit they represented was a ship, a submarine, or an aircraft. Madje knew enough about the JOTS system to know that the white numbers next to each symbol represented the age of the information that fixed its location. Up to the north, the ages of most of the Indian symbols went back hours, in some cases back to the start of the exercise.

  Captain Hawkins was a New Englander and sounded it. “We’re nearly blind,” he said quietly. “I’ve got Supplot working flat out and I’m using every ELINT tool in the book, but the Indians have pretty good transmission discipline.” He rubbed his eyes, passed a hand over his face as if washing it. “Can you get the admiral to override Captain Lash and get one of the S-3’s in Trincomalee to go up on a recce flight?”

  Madje was used to staff politics, but this was a new level—operational politics. Politics in the face of the enemy—whoever the enemy was. Why am I surprised? He asked himself. All he said was “Sorry, sir?” with a look of incomprehension.

  “Captain Lash has decided not to fly any planes where they could quote provoke end quote the mutineers.” Hawkins swiveled to face Madje, held up his hands as if to prevent argument. “Hear me out. I think this boat is under threat, first, from a possible submarine attack, second, from mainland air strikes, third, from surface action. I don’t even know which of the exercise ships is friendly and which is enemy. There were some attempts to communicate, early on; we know their carrier was friendly and is now heavily damaged. If they targeted us and fired a missile salvo, we wouldn’t even be able to strike back over the horizon. Captain Lash is aware of all this but sees it as his duty to make the best speed for Sri Lanka and avoid further contact.”

  “You think he’s wrong.” And O’Leary didn’t like Lash, either.

  Madje felt as if he were sinking in mud. He’d experienced this sort of thing before, bad enough when the admiral was an active player and he had a flag captain and a chief of staff to fall back on to filter the politics for him. Now, he alone had the access to the admiral. And Hawkins knew it. Madje admired Hawkins, a former surface-warfare officer with real decorations and an admirable record, but he was known to be very political. “You think we need to know what’s over the horizon.”

  “Damn straight.”

  The trouble was, it made too much sense. Hawkins was right, as far as Madje could see. One of the S-3s out of Sri Lanka could stay fifty miles to the south of them, giving gas, and still get them some kind of radar picture of the forces to the north. Madje knew how it could be done. He couldn’t see any risk. “I’ll see what I can do, sir,” he said cautiously. “The admiral isn’t in really good shape.” Understatement of the year.

  “Rafehausen would never let this happen if he were aware,” Hawkins said with conviction. He raised an eyebrow.

  Madje got the clear impression that Hawkins was asking him to lie—to call Lash and claim the admiral had given him an order.

  “I’ll put it to him, sir,” he said. “That’s the best I can do.”

  Hawkins swiveled back to his screen, wiped his face again, and ran his hand through his hair. “Good. Then get your ass back here and take a watch.”

  Bhulta Airfield, India

  After his phone calls, Alan gathered his troops in the shade of Harry’s jet. They had put on clean clothes, those who had them, and Alan was in some of Harry’s. All the men but Alan had shaved. They had a new energy and a new eagerness because they thought they were getting out.

  “There’s been a c
hange,” Alan said. The faces closed, and Fidel started nodding. “We’ve had new orders.” And he told them.

  Fidel looked at him with disgust. “I knew it.”

  Alan pulled him aside while the others cleaned out the van. “Fidel, you’re a great man to have around when there’s real trouble, but I sure don’t need you making wiseass comments when I’m trying to talk to the troops.”

  Fidel’s face got red, less with embarrassment than anger, Alan thought. “I apologize,” Fidel said.

  “That isn’t good enough. Don’t do it again. You understand me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You know what morale means, Fidel?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You know what one bad mouth can do to morale?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, help me out, can’t you?” Alan grabbed his arm. “It’s no secret, I need you. Without you yesterday, we’d be dead. I want to go home, too. But I have orders and I’m going to do what I’ve been told to do, without any remarks and without any bitching. I’m only asking you to do the same.”

  Fidel grinned. “You’ve just begun to fight, right?”

  “What the hell’s that mean?”

  “John Paul Jones.”

  Alan didn’t get it, gave up trying to figure it out. “We on the same page now?”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry I mouthed off.”

  “Okay. What I want you to do is make sure all the weapons are out of the van and in the aircraft. Police it for cartridges, casings, anything. When all this is over, the Indians will start accounting for some of their deaths. I don’t want them finding a rifle that killed one of their people in a car that we rented—capisce?”

  “What about the van?”

  It was on Alan’s credit card. He’d already decided he had to take the hit. “Lock it and leave it. I told Bahrain to tell the company to pick it up.”

  Fidel laughed. “By the time they get here, we’ll be lucky if it’s got doors on it.”

  15

  In the Air, Bhulta-Ambur

  “The Servants of the Earth are a philanthropic environmental society. That’s what their website says, anyway.”

  Ong was briefing Alan and Harry as the plane flew across southern India. Ong had gone to Google and got more than twenty good hits before they began to scatter off into irrelevance.

  “Their aims are to bring the earth back from environmental catastrophe. They don’t say right out how they’re going to do this, but ‘random acts of service’ is a phrase that crops up a lot.” She looked at her notes. “They have a surprising amount of money. That’s not on their website, except by implication, but they have several ‘projects’ that have to cost a bundle.

  “They also have some interesting people. The website is a recruiting tool—by the way, the same animation is on the website as on the USB keys, but it’s tied specifically to recruiting. In fact there are several animated sections, really cute, very professional—speaks to technical know-how.

  “They’re very up-front about recruiting. They say they want ‘India’s best’—by the way, this is a specifically Indian thing; you can access the website in English and eleven Indian languages but no others, which says to me they don’t want Europeans or Chinese or whatever. Anyway—” She looked at her notes again. “Oh, yeah, ‘India’s best.’ They give the specs for the ideal member: twenty-two to fifty-two, at least a college degree, makes eighteen thousand US or more a year, and in India, that’s pretty good, is in the sciences, technology, the military, or local or national government.”

  Ong scratched in her black hair with the end of a pencil. She frowned. “They make themselves sound squeaky-clean, but some other websites say they’re real bad news. I dunno—not enough sources and no criteria to judge, you know? I do think they’re connected with Hindu nationalism, maybe pretty far right. The leader is somebody named Mohenjo Daro, who’s a businessman, but there’s one source that says he was connected with the destruction of a Sikh thing called the Golden Temple. Before my time.” She smirked. “Couple of newspaper pieces about them that really sensationalize them. Called a cult. But another calls them ‘the cutting-edge business conglomerate.’ I have yet to research that part, the businesses, I mean. What I could deduce, they seem to own stuff—a dairy company, big deal, but a petrochemical plant, an outfit that’s into genetic engineering, a smalltime pharmaceuticals company—I don’t know, I don’t have details and these things don’t hang together very well.”

  Alan said, “Sounds like real money. How’d they get it?”

  Alan and Harry were sitting in the seats farthest back toward the tail; Harry had showed her how to reverse the seatback of the next row, so she was facing them with a pulldown table and her laptop between them.

  “We-e-e-ll—” Ong had learned a lot of her gestures and expressions from TV. “Most of the stuff on the net is positive, I mean, it’s PR stuff. Maybe put out by members? But the negative stuff is some of it really rough. One website, this is a fringe thing, I admit, is named ‘Servants of the Worst’ and is a kind of riff on the Servants’ own site—animations, that logo that buzzes around like a bee, a parody of their tone. What it says is that these folks are bad, they’re violent, they’ve got big plans and they’re out to destroy India. It’s pretty melodramatic.”

  “Whose site?”

  “One of the SOE sites says it was put together by a patient in a mental institution. The site itself says he or she was a novice member and got fed up—‘nauseated’ is the word—and tried to leave and was threatened, then got beat up, finally changed his or her name and left the country. Which brings me to the kicker, because I’m almost done.”

  “And—?”

  “This person who says he/she was a novice member says that when there are ‘in-gatherings,’ which are like weekly meetings, every member carries a key, which he plugs into ‘the yoni of the earth’ as they enter the meeting. I had to look up ‘yoni.’” She smiled and may have tried to blush. “It means ‘vagina.’ Call it what you will, it’s a computer port, because ‘on the screen,’ the novice says, quote, ‘we were told that every day we should look around us and choose for destruction the greatest insult we could find to earth and nature.’ Then you were supposed to keep a list and prioritize it so that, quote, ‘you as servant of the earth can focus the forces of Shiva when the moment comes.’”

  “The forces of Shiva,” Harry said. He looked at Alan. “Shiva’s a destroyer; that’s all we know and all we need to know. Make a list of local-level targets and go after them when the day comes.”

  “Like cell-phone towers, high-rises, strip malls—”

  “Power plants, untreated sewage, chicken factories—in fact, most of exactly what’s been hit all over India.”

  Alan looked at Ong. “How many people in this outfit?”

  “Nobody knows. Estimates run from ten thousand to a hundred thousand.”

  Harry shook his head. “Not important; question is, what people? If they really have technocrats, scientists, government workers, the military—and we know they’ve got some of the military—that’s news.”

  “But they’d have to be fanatics.”

  “Oh, really? What kind of guy you think power-dives a jet into an aircraft carrier?”

  Bahrain

  Mike Dukas was at Manama’s airport only ten minutes before Mary Totten’s flight was scheduled to land. The way he was running behind, he figured he should be grateful he wasn’t half an hour late. He had meant to send Greenbaum, but it had made more sense to leave Greenbaum in the office with Leslie, who was giving him a crash course in Not Pissing Off Mike Dukas.

  He went straight to the VIP office and pulled into his wake the greeter and the two security men who were waiting for him. They made it to the top of the ramp in the arrival lounge with two minutes to spare, which Dukas spent on a cell phone checking out Rattner’s progress on the terrorist-attack prep. Then the aircraft whined up to the gate and the door opened and they walked down, and the
VIP greeter was in the door as soon as it opened, contacting the CIA woman by seat number—to him, she was Ms Brevard—and bringing her out before anybody else could embark.

  Dukas introduced himself, looked over her shoulder, saw a sad-sack guy who looked like something from a Dilbert cartoon.

  “My special assistant,” Mary Totten said.

  Nerd city.

  In Customs and Immigration, the nerd caused a small flurry because he didn’t respond to the name on his passport and had to be reminded that he was using the name Bill Grayling. Smiles all around.

  “Early in the day,” Dukas said, although it was noon. When they were getting into his car, he said to the nerd, “You new at this?”

  “No. Yes. Well, no—I’m really an analyst—”

  “I could have guessed.” Dukas put him in the back and had Mary Totten sit in front next to him. “Well, if you never leave Bahrain, you’ll be okay.”

  “Never leave Bahrain, my ass! I’m outa here on the first plane I can get.”

  “If you mean India, there are no planes. India’s closed.”

  “The Navy can lay on a clandestine flight for us.”

  Dukas grinned. This woman was going to be fun. “Miz Totten—Mary—Miz Brevard—there’s something you need to understand.” He risked a look away from the traffic and grinned at her. “The Navy isn’t laying on anything for anybody.”

  She was a very good-looking woman, he decided, even after a night and part of a day on an airplane. A few lines to give her face character, a few gray hairs, a good body—heavy-boned, fit, tall—and eyes that didn’t take any shit from anybody. Hottin’ Totten.

  “I can either take you straight to your hotel, or we can stop at my office, you can look at some recent message traffic”

  “What I want to do, Mike, is get the hell out of Bahrain.”

  “Gee, Mary,” Bill said from the back, “we lost a lot of sleep. Let’s go to the—”